All posts tagged "meat"

As you probably know, this has been disastrous for public health in the
United States, even though their tort laws mean consumers can take more
effective action than New Zealand consumers can. American meat companies
sell meat contaminated with effluent and meat from diseased animals to
consumers who subsequently fall ill and even die, because federal
authorities have allowed the meat inspection regime there to be
delegated to meat companies themselves.

For me as a consumer, meat is sold in a very imperfect market. I can
only detect improperly inspected meat when I get sick, and even then I
may not connect my ill health with the meat. Moreover, I don't know
which meat company to blame, since supermarkets and butchers typically
don't label their meat with the supplier's name. Therefore market
signals from local consumers are unlikely to encourage quality
inspections from meat companies.

I am also concerned about the impact to New Zealand's economy from this
change. Meat is a very important export product, and our quality
standards are vital for maintaining our export markets. It will only
take one rogue inspection in one company to ruin the market for
everyone, with appreciable consequences for all New Zealanders.

I urge you as the responsible minister to do all that you can to stop
this change in policy now.

On the left, half an onion. It is there for scale. On the right, pure lamb tallow.

When you slow-roast 1250g of lamb for four hours, this is how much fat renders out, at minumum.

I have a fat separating jug, so I poured off some jus or gravy or what have you. The rest of the liquid I poured into cold water and moulded into a ball, so that you could see it here. It weighs about 120g, and it's obviously not ALL the fat that comes out, just what I could recover easily.

It is good that Kathy is on the phone to her mother, because if she had asked "what are you doing?", I would have had to answer "moulding lamb tallow into a ball so I can weigh it and take a photo." I'm not sure whether this is a normal thing to be doing.

Kathy's away this weekend so I took the opportunity to buy a really good steak. She's a pretty tolerant vegetarian but I feel better keeping the more obnoxious meat to myself.

I don't eat meat that often, and when I do I tend to favour cheap tasty cuts, but every now and then a chap needs a treat. It was too wet to barbeque, so I pan fried the steak. But anyway, it got me thinking about aging. I bought a slice of sirloin from Meat on Tory. They cut a good thick one for me, because the display case steaks were too thin for my liking, and as we were talking they mentioned how they took care to age their beef.

Long ago — when National were last in government — I worked for the now defunct Meat Industry Reseach Institute of New Zealand, MIRINZ. It was a very interesting job. I talked to all the researchers as I put together publications. I loved talking to scientists and engineers. They really cared about what they were doing and they wanted to tell other people about it. They were working on everything: figuring out how to ensure export, developing new small goods, recovering interesting chemicals from freezing works effluent, and making spooky machines [this story is not (very) true]. So I learned about meat science. (Yes, that's really a discipline).

And so I learned about aging. It surprises me, seeing that we love grilled or fried meat so much in this country, that most people don't seem to know about this. Here's the deal.

Two important things happen when you keep meat around for a while.

Tenderness. From the instant of death, muscle starts to dissolve. Very slowly, the proteins break down. This isn't rotting or decomposition — it's just a natural consequence of the enzymes in the meat acting on the rest of the tissue. So the longer you keep meat, the more tender it gets, as the tough fibres that make it chewy literally fray and snap. This also changes the flavour a little.

Moisture loss. When you age beef, you keep it somewhere cool and dry. Over time, moisture evaporates out of the meat. The result is that flavours become more intense and concentrated.

This is usually only done with beef and venison. Other meats are already tender enough and develop off-flavours over time, although some people will age game birds, rabbits and hares too. (Maybe you could do it with mutton, but proper mutton just has no market in New Zealand).

So anyway, if your butcher is patient enough to keep carcasses around for a few weeks, they can sell you something more tender and tasty. It won't be off or rotten or anything, but it will be delicious.

Not all beef is aged, however. You can get good results from a couple of weeks' aging, but that means the poor old butcher has to have a pipeline of carcasses chilling somewhere. And the meat's losing weight to evaporation every day, which is a problem, because it's sold by weight. So there is a strong incentive for businesses catering to the cheap end of the market to skimp on the aging.

You can actually age beef yourself. If you have a cut with good fat cover, you can put it on a plate uncovered in your fridge for a few days, and just trim off the dried bits. But this can be error-prone. Better to make friends with a good butcher.

The whole aging thing assumes you have somewhere cool and dry to hang your meat. Cuisines from warmer parts don't have aged meat, because before refrigeration, it really would rot. Instead, they cut their meat fine, or mince it, or stew it for a long time. That's why there is no traditional steak from the Middle East or Asia — steak requires cool rooms for aging and beasts that were grown for meat and not as draught animals. In those places the prestige meat dishes are generally made with very fine, spiced mince, for example kibbeh, which is tasty, tender, and labour-intensive.